


New Duties

by linndechir



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-22
Updated: 2017-11-22
Packaged: 2019-02-05 03:18:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12785799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linndechir/pseuds/linndechir
Summary: Robert dies in the Rebellion, but his forces still prevail. The remaining leaders of the Rebellion decide to crown Stannis instead.





	New Duties

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The_Plaid_Slytherin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Plaid_Slytherin/gifts).



> I was really excited to see this prompt of yours during signups because I had actually been thinking about a similar AU not too long ago! So I really enjoyed writing this and I hope you like it. And maybe I'll play around a bit more with this idea in the future because it's such an interesting scenario.

Davos had spent hours waiting in a small study he'd been shown to earlier in the day. He hadn't been sure what to do with himself – he couldn't read any of the countless papers on the desk, and apparently nobody expected him to do anything but wait. Lord Stannis hadn't offered any explanation for why he had asked – no, ordered – Davos to accompany him to King's Landing after the siege had been lifted. Davos didn't know anything about wars or politics, or any of the other things that great lords discussed behind closed doors.

He'd seen the Red Keep countless times from below, but he'd never been inside of it. It was still chaotic, soldiers and knights everywhere, men in splendid, but blood-stained armour hurrying along grand corridors, most of the finery probably hidden away or carried off, but still more impressive than anything a smuggler from Flea Bottom had ever seen in his life. Davos was sure he must have passed more than a few important people on his way through the Keep, but it wasn't as if he would have recognised any of them. Instead he waited. 

Lord Stannis had seemed preoccupied on the way to the capital and barely spoken a word to him, but Davos had been able to tell that he seemed uncertain. Everyone did since the news of Lord Robert Baratheon's death at the Trident. The stories – and they seemed to gain a few new details every time someone told them until Davos wasn't entirely sure anymore what was the truth – the stories said that he'd killed Prince Rhaegar in single combat, but suffered a mortal wound at the same time. Still he'd kept fighting, but as the battle came to an end, he'd finally succumbed to his injuries. The number of enemies he took with him in his last moments seemed to grow steadily and had already become rather unlikely.

Davos jumped up from a far too comfortable chair when the doors opened and Lord Stannis strode in, dismissing the guards that trailed behind him with an angry wave of his hand and a snarled “Leave us”. He wore heavier armour than he had during the siege, although even then he'd refused to stop wearing chainmail, despite the fact that he'd been so starved that carrying the extra weight must have been unbearable. But he'd said they were at war, and a man at war didn't wear silks.

“M'lord?” Davos asked carefully when Lord Stannis stepped to the window to look outside without acknowledging him. Had he maybe forgotten that he'd told Davos to wait here? But then he'd never struck Davos as a forgetful man. He didn't flinch now when Davos spoke.

“Trust Robert to leave all the responsibility to others,” he said, his voice like gravel. “He starts a rebellion against the throne, drags the entire country into his war, and then dies so others will have to deal with the consequences.”

Davos didn't bother to point out how unfair it was to blame a man for his death in battle. Anger was hardly the most unusual way of dealing with grief, and there was grief somewhere beneath that angry frown. Davos had seen Lord Stannis's face when he'd first read the message about his brother's death.

“They wanted to put him on the throne. Arryn and Stark. As if Robert had ever bothered to learn a single thing about a lord's duties, let alone a king's.”

Davos nodded because he didn't know what to say. All he knew about royal inheritance was that a king's eldest son would be king after him – he didn't know what happened if there was a rebellion. Didn't know if lords had rules for that sort of thing, or if the man with the biggest army simply did what he wanted. Wasn't that how the Targaryens had gained the throne in the first place?

“And now they want to crown me,” Lord Stannis continued. He sounded as if he'd been informed of the death of yet another relative, and Davos could see the muscles work in his strong jaw. 

“They what?” he asked before it occurred to him that his surprise could have easily offended. Instead, Lord Stannis laughed – a rough bark from a throat that wasn't used to laughter.

“I said the same thing.” He finally turned away from the window to look at Davos. His face had become a little less gaunt since he'd started eating every day again, but he still looked more gaunt than a man his age should. A boy, really. It was easy to forget how young he was when he bore himself with such confidence. “My grandmother was a Targaryen. King Aerys's aunt. They seem to think a bit of Targaryen blood will grant their rebellion legitimacy when everyone knows that all of this happened to dispose of too much Targaryen madness.”

Davos stepped closer to him. His fingertips, or rather the stumps where his fingertips had been, itched, and he rubbed them absent-mindedly. They were healing well, but sometimes they still ached. He felt Lord Stannis's gaze slide down to them, but as always there was no regret in his eyes. He'd done what he'd been convinced was right. There was no such certainty in his eyes now. It made him look younger, as young as he truly was – those ocean-blue eyes wide, the constant frown he wore filled with doubt for once rather than determination. Fear almost. Davos had barely seen fear in his eyes during the siege, although he suspected that it was more because Lord Stannis had learnt to hide it rather than because he'd never felt it.

“What happens if you refuse, m'lord?” Davos asked. He never would have thought anyone would want to refuse a crown, but Lord Stannis had turned out to be nothing at all like Davos would have imagined a lord, let alone a king. 

Lord Stannis gave him a strange look – not as if the thought had not occurred to him before, but as if he hadn't expected Davos to voice it.

“Aerys had a second son, a young boy, hidden away on Dragonstone. Maybe he'd grow up to be a fine man, a good king, but after so much blood, nobody wants to put Aerys's son on the throne.” Lord Stannis started pacing, then caught himself after a few steps and stopped, like a man who'd remembered he was indulging in a bad habit. “Eddard Stark has no ambition to rule, and even if he did, I don't think the Southron lords would bend the knee to a Northerner. Lord Arryn might be the best choice, but if he takes the throne, it will inevitably look like he engineered this whole rebellion for his own gain. He's too careful to risk that. No, they need that thin veneer of legitimacy if they don't want all the lords who fought under Robert's banner to turn on each other, and now that he's dead, that legitimacy just happens to be attached to me.”

“You say it like the other lords aren't any happier about it than you are,” Davos said. He still steeled himself a little when he spoke his mind so freely to a man who could have had him executed even before anyone spoke of making him king, but even when his words angered Lord Stannis, he tended to listen to them rather than dismiss them. It was an odd feeling, to have the kind of man who usually wouldn't even deign to look at Davos pay such close attention to him.

“When I serve as a replacement for Robert?” Lord Stannis snorted. “You haven't met my brother, but everyone adored him. I'm not sure what for, but they did. Few men have ever liked me.”

Davos decided against saying that he did, in fact, quite like him – not because Lord Stannis was easy to like, but because he was refreshingly honest, and as stern with himself as he was with others. There was a severity about him that made Davos wonder if he couldn't be a better man as well, though he supposed that many men would rather not be reminded of their own shortcomings.

Lord Stannis turned his attention to the window again, to the dark clouds that were gathering in the sky outside. Despite his frowning, there was barely a line on his face yet, and without the ashen pallor of hunger his skin looked smooth, young.

“When I was a boy,” he started, as if that had been a lifetime ago rather than a few years, “I sometimes dreamt of being the eldest. Robert was never interested in learning how to rule. He even said as much – that all the duties we were taught about that fell on his shoulders as Lord of Storm's End were a tedious burden that would only keep him away from the things he wanted to do. Hunting, fighting, drinking. I often thought I'd make a better lord than him, but I accepted that that wasn't my place in the world. My place was to serve him, to support him, but never to presume to know better.”

There was a bitterness in his tone that belied just how gracious that acceptance had been, and yet as different as their positions were, Davos had an inkling of how Lord Stannis must feel. The knighthood and the lands he'd been granted had changed everything he'd known to be true about his life, they had changed the very foundation of who he was – a smuggler, a criminal who had expected his life to end in a noose some day, suddenly bestowed with a title and land he didn't even know what to do with yet. He supposed that a crown must feel equally foreign to a man who'd expected to live his life in his older brother's shadow.

“I have no right to the Iron Throne, no more than Eddard Stark or Jon Arryn,” Lord Stannis continued. Davos's silences didn't seem to bother him, maybe because he was thinking out loud rather than truly talking to him. “But nothing would be gained if I simply returned to Storm's End and let everyone else fight over that ugly monstrosity of a throne.”

That grim smile twisted his lips again, like his face didn't quite know how to smile anymore. “Maybe that is my duty to Robert now, cleaning up what he's left behind.”

Davos couldn't help a small laugh at that, and regretted it immediately when Lord Stannis's frown deepened, as if he thought he was being mocked. 

“Look at it that way, m'lord,” he said quickly, rather than trying to reassure him that he hadn't been laughing at his expense. “It can't be any worse than the siege.”

“I think I'd take eating rats over dining with snakes,” Lord Stannis said, but his frown smoothed out. He was studying Davos again, out of eyes as blue as the waters around Storm's End, strong and deep and once again hiding whatever fear he had to be feeling. After what felt like a very long time, as if he'd been looking for an answer and finally found it, he said, “Stay in King's Landing with me, Ser Davos.”

It sounded somewhat less like an order than when he'd been dragged here in the first place, or when he'd been told to wait in this study, so Davos allowed himself to ask, “Pardon the question, but why, m'lord? I'm a smuggler. That's all I know. I've already offered you all the services I have to give, and I doubt a king will need them.”

The muscles in Lord Stannis's jaw twitched again, but it was not his usual teeth-grinding. More like he'd been tempted to smile for a moment and then thought better of it. Something about the look in his eyes made Davos feel as if he'd passed some kind of test he hadn't even been aware of.

“Because I told you that I will soon sit the Iron Throne and rule these Seven Kingdoms, and you haven't offered me a word of flattery, you haven't asked for titles and riches and boons, and you still speak your mind.” No word that left Lord Stannis's lips ever sounded like a compliment, more often than not he made the most innocuous remarks sound like insults, and yet somehow he still seemed pleased. “Between all the sycophants and schemers that will soon start flocking around me like gadflies around a horse, I'll need at least one honest man by my side.”

“And the most honest man you can find is a criminal?”

“You've paid for your crimes.” Lord Stannis's gaze flicked again to Davos's maimed right hand. Before he'd taken his fingertips, he'd explained to Davos at length that good deeds didn't wash out the bad any more than the other way around. What he'd offered Davos, with a punishment that could have seemed cruel, was a clean slate. 

“I'll stay if that's what you ask of me, m'lord,” he said. Lord Stannis didn't smile, he only nodded and turned his attention back to the clouds outside. 

“It'll be _Your Grace_ soon,” he said. It didn't sound like a haughty correction, more as if the thought had only just occurred to him now. And then, as if to swat it aside like a fly that distracted him from more important matters, he said, “Dragonstone is still in Targaryen hands. You know the water around Blackwater Bay better than anyone – so maybe you have yet more services to offer me than you thought, Ser Davos.”


End file.
